With hundreds of workers called in from all over the country to help clean up the nation’s largest coal ash spill, few knew each other before the job.

But they would come to share a slew of symptoms.

“Everybody had blisters,” Knoxville native Ansol Clark said.

Worker Jeff Brewer described them as “festering boils” that would burst and scar his skin.

The health problems follow cleanup efforts for the massive coal ash spill that occurred at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant in December 2008.

'A terrible headache'

Workers' eyes burned. They had migraines, some for the first time in their lives.

Foreman Brad Green remembers his first migraine on the site. He was sitting in a truck near a section known as “The Relic,” which was being torn down.

“I got a terrible headache,” he said. “And it just kept getting worse and worse until the point I almost got sick to my stomach.”

CLOSE

More than 50 coal ash spill cleanup workers and workers' survivors are suiing Jacobs Engineering for unsafe working conditions that they allege lead to sickness and death at the cleanup site.
Angela Gosnell/News Sentinel

The pain went away when he left that area. The next time he went to The Relic, the same thing happened again. He quit going there.

“You’d be sitting in the truck,” Brewer recalled. “You wouldn’t go to sleep – it was like you’d just drop out. Some of the flaggers would knock on the (window). That’s when I realized something out there was really wrong.”

Discussing woes atop coal ash

At one point, as many as 30 workers had gone to their doctors for fatigue and learned their testosterone levels were abnormally low, medical records show.

Soon the workers began talking about their health woes over lunch – atop coal ash.

“A bunch of us was eating lunch and … we got to talking to one another,” Brewer recalled. “A lot of us found out we were sick.”

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360 Video: Visit the Kingston coal ash spill site today

Michael McCarthy, a member of a safety team representing workers, confronted Jacobs Engineering safety manager Tom Bock about whether all that coal ash they were toiling in was dangerous.

“He told me there was absolutely nothing wrong with the ash, (that) it’s been tested hundreds of times,” McCarthy said.

Green said he filed several safety complaints that wound up in the garbage, as far as he knew. Workers who asked about filing for worker’s compensation for doctor bills were met with threatened layoffs, McCarthy said,

Secret recordings begin

Cox began documenting his talks with Tom Bock, the Jacobs safety manager.

“I carried a tape recorder in my pocket for two months for conversations with (Bock),” Cox said.

CLOSE

On separate occasions, workers secretly filmed Jacobs Engineering staffers cleaning coal ash out of monitor filters before packaging them to be sent for testing.
Submitted

He wasn’t the only one recording. Others began making secret videotapes and audiotapes of exchanges with Bock, Jacobs supervisor Chris Eich and TVA’s Dwayne Rushing.

A review by USA TODAY NETWORK-Tennessee of audio and video recordings by the workers along with deposition testimony showed the following:

● Workers demanding dust masks were repeatedly threatened with layoffs. Eich is recorded telling McCarthy he would “hang himself with his own” genitalia if he demanded a mask.

● Bock routinely told workers coal ash was safe. He said they could eat a pound a day with no worries. Even the American Coal Association hasn’t publicly advanced that notion.

● Bock refused requests for respirators even though TVA’s own safety plan approved by the EPA for the site said the devices might be necessary and could be worn “voluntarily” by laborers so long as they could work safely in them.

● Eich told workers it wasn’t the coal ash that was causing them respiratory problems. It was pollen, he said.

● Rushing mocked workers at a staff meeting who were complaining of low testosterone, telling workers he’d be happy to “take care” of their wives for them. He was required under the EPA approved plan to tell his TVA supervisors about those complaints. He didn’t, by his own admission.

● Bock claimed he was an “industrial hygienist” when a worker asked to see someone in that position as the EPA-approved safety plan allowed.

Foreman Green, who is not suing anyone, said Bock routinely disregarded doctors’ orders that workers be provided respirators.

“Tom Bock would start telling you that the doctor was wrong, that you didn't have these problems, and that you didn't need this and you didn't need that,” Green said. “So my question to him was 'when did you become a medical doctor?'”